


Glitch in the System: Pas de Deux

by SystemGlitch



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Dancing, F/F, vague allusions to sexual tension are our bread and butter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-25 04:03:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12027720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SystemGlitch/pseuds/SystemGlitch
Summary: By K.Sombra drags Widowmaker to a club.An illuminating dance metaphor happens.





	Glitch in the System: Pas de Deux

“Who drinks wine at a club?”

Sombra watched as the bartender turned her back to them, yanking open a painted steel plate door just past the counter’s end and disappearing down the stairs beyond. Widowmaker shrugged, leaning forward against the bar to avoid contact with the passel of neon-clad patrons pushing through the crowd toward the dance floor.

“Someone who does not go to clubs,” she replied, shrugging bare, angular shoulders.

Looking infinitely more at home than Widowmaker felt, Sombra, in a mix of vinyl and ultraviolet-reactive paint, shook her head. “You’re ridiculous.”

The taller woman turned her attention to the plate door opening anew, yielding to the bartender’s shoulder as she carried a bottle beneath one arm. “This  _place_  is ridiculous,” she murmured, nodding her approval of the sangiovese presented her. “I don’t even dance.”

Sombra laughed, her dismissal audible even above the music. “You’re a fucking ballerina,” she grinned, pushing herself away from the bar. “You do too dance. So, dance,” she said, disappearing with a few backwards steps into the crowd.

Widowmaker sighed, plucking the glass from the lacquered bar surface by the stem and tucking her frown firmly behind its rim. In the week since their curious slumber party and all its uncomfortable vulnerability, Sombra made it her mission to get the sniper out of the compound, suggesting everything from farmer’s markets to street fairs to, well,  _this_. She persisted, making suggestions as quickly as Widowmaker could shoot them down and claiming it would “be good for her”, whatever that meant.

“All you’ve done is read since I dropped that intel on you,” Sombra said, stealing the time-worn and tattered paperback copy of Gustave Flaubert’s  _La Tentation de Saint Antoine_  from her grasp with deft fingertips. “I’m getting you out of here if it kills me, Lacroix.”

Ultimately, Widowmaker acquiesced - not out of any latent desire to participate in one of the hacker’s proposed “adventures”, but out of a sneaking suspicion Sombra would never let her hear the end of it if she didn’t. Now, turning to face the crowd, she watched the impasto of bodies with passive curiosity, considering its individual human parts as much as the picture they came together to create.

Sombra was right about one thing - she  _did_  know how to dance.  _Obviously_ , the sniper scoffed, recalling with clarity her years of barre, of blaring stage lights, of complex  _allégro_  and whirlwind  _tours piqué_  set to Tchaikovsky, of applause and roses and Gérard’s perfect crescent smile in the second row. Yes, she could dance, but the Paris Opera Ballet was a world far removed from the one in which she now found herself, with its steady common time, obscure samples, and ground-shaking beats. There was no choreography here, and the stories were told in real time, with real people; no practice, no adaptation, no correction.

It felt, annoyingly enough, like a metaphor.

Draining her glass, Widowmaker moved from the bar with the tart, fruit-forward bloom of cherry, clove, and fig still fresh on her lips. Contrite as it was, that metaphor warranted at least a moment’s contemplation: in the wake of the dossier Sombra inelegantly dropped in her lap, the sniper recognized with a pale shadow of what she could only call bitterness how singular her life was, how Talon’s artificially constructed tunnel vision governed her every move and breath. If her life until that evening were comparable to anything, it was the rote of balletic routine - polished and repetitiously ingrained; now, however, she was gifted with awareness of her own programming - and the opportunity to test its boundaries. A new dance, unpracticed and daring and  _hers_.

She picked her way across the floor, slipping between dancers with practiced ease as she neared its epicenter, rounding on Sombra. Wherever she went, the hacker seemed to make friends of one sort or another and this was, evidently, no different. As she approached, Widowmaker considered the man with whom her colleague was dancing: dark skinned and broad-shouldered; a handsome fellow, dressed similarly in screaming neon and fishnet. He looked a better match for Sombra than she did in her simple, low-backed black dress, but it required only a few seconds’ observation of his lack of rhythm to conclude that, despite the dramatic difference in their repertoires, she’d prove an infinitely better dance partner.

“ _Scusami_ ,” she interrupted, tapping him on the shoulder. He turned to face her, brows knit in confusion as much as in an attempt to better understand her over the din. As he made eye contact, the sniper glanced over his shoulder to Sombra smirking bemusedly behind him.

“ _Che_?” he asked, looking back to Sombra, then the taller woman. “ _C’è un problema?_ ”

“ _Nessun problema,_ ” she replied, offering a polite, albeit false, smile. “ _Ma, tre sono una folla._ ”

He looked between the two of them again, his bafflement giving way to some semblance of understanding. Whether it was the  _correct_ understanding was an entirely different matter, but the desired effect was the same. Nodding his accession as much as his goodbyes, he saw himself elsewhere, leaving the pair to themselves.

“Hey,” Sombra grinned.

“Don’t make it weird,” Widowmaker replied, clearing the space between them in a few, small steps. “You told me to dance; let’s dance.”

* * *

A distant belltower proclaimed early morning as they fled the heady warmth of the club, fingers loosely intertwined even after they cleared the throng of patrons likewise heeding the declaration of last call. Widowmaker didn’t need the excuse, but offered it all the same; even after the closeness they shared that evening, she was unable to appropriately express her creeping preference for the hacker’s attention. Had she asked, she was sure Sombra would have obliged despite the ribbing that would inevitably accompany her agreement. Instead, Widowmaker offered the clumsy suggestion it would prevent their being separated among the crowd. Sombra, of course, accepted, wasting no time in retrieving the taller woman’s hands from her waist and guiding her toward the exit.

They walked in silence, the steady click of the sniper’s heels echoing off the walls of otherwise uncrowded cobblestone streets. Few businesses were open at this hour save for the odd convenience store or after-hours bar, allowing them the illusion of having old Italy entirely at their disposal. Widowmaker thought she wouldn’t mind that too terribly.

In truth, she found herself minding her time with Sombra less and less as the days passed them by. Though she wasn’t any more inclined to indulge in the hacker’s proposed escapades, Widowmaker found the intrinsic frustration at her attempts waning, replaced with something markedly different. She tried to pinpoint it, tried to give it a name, but found her vocabulary lacking. She almost asked, once, if Sombra had a word for it - if she felt it, too - but the question felt cumbersome on her tongue, unwieldy and more than a little embarrassing. Even that discrete brush with self-consciousness made her, well, self-conscious.

Still, that  _something_  was there, cultivated by and in their time together. She felt it in the aftermath of that single, soft evening and in the brush of their hips as they danced for hours, the space between them reduced to a hair’s breadth even as Widowmaker half-laughed that she still had no idea what she was doing.

“No one here does,” Sombra smiled, her lips barely grazing her ear. “That’s the best part.”

As they rounded the corner that set them on the home stretch of their long walk back to the compound, Sombra moved to release her hand, but the assassin held firm.

“ _Que?_ ” she asked, canting her head.

Widowmaker smiled, small but genuine as she replied.

“I have  _no_  idea what I’m doing.”


End file.
